


Divergence

by MatteBluDragon



Series: Divergence [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Original Character(s), Political Intrigue, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 17:58:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15124865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MatteBluDragon/pseuds/MatteBluDragon
Summary: While the average citizen might observe their luxurious lifestyle slowly crumbling around them as the resources it depended on run out, might cling to what's left to find some semblance of balance in a world spiraling out of control, a man like Nathan Irons has problems of an entirely different - or even unearthly - nature to face.(Prewar Divergence AU)





	Divergence

2065 | Irrawaddy Delta, Burma  
  
  
Nathan stopped struggling when he understood it was futile. He was trapped, trapped under the burning fuselage of the helicopter. Trapped by the shards of his own Gen III Combat Armour as it continued cut into his flesh.  
  
It didn’t take a genius to realise that he was going to die, and that it was going to be a horrible death. Slow.  
  
And this was when he was having fun for the first time in his life.  
  
_No. This can’t end like this._ _  
_ _  
_ He moved again, struggling against tons of twisted piping hot metal, his cracked visor filling up with the blood from his forehead, struggling to suck in oxygen through his gas mask.  
_  
_ He couldn’t feel his legs anymore,but he could feel something sharp break through his skin just under his knee. Something cool seeped into his pants and he felt a sudden drowsiness.  
  
_Oh. Probably just what is left of my leg poking through my skin now._  
  
He tried to laugh, but failed. Not enough air.  
  
Fucking fire. Competing with him for Oxygen. Wasting it, burning it. And it would burn him too, soon. Just a few more layers of leather and ceramic and steel.  
  
But wasn’t it what he did? Wasting and burning oxygen? Burning people too...perhaps that comparison was more symbolic in any case. He wasn’t a pyromaniac.  
  
_The fuck did that matter now?_  
  
He craned his neck to one side, still wheezing through the gasmask. No other apparent survivors, just Private Terrance. He was out in the cool air, unhurt. Simply passed out.  
  
_Fucker would live._ _  
_  
What about him? He couldn’t simply die.  
  
He couldn’t die. Not like this, not so tantalizingly close to cold air.  
  
Both his hands and legs were trapped under a burning mess, and probably had become a burning mess by now. The pain hadn’t kicked in yet, but he was sure it would soon.  
  
He tried to struggle again, and he did. With all his strength he jerked and jerked and jerked till he felt something _SNAP_ audibly. Then the pain kicked in.  
  
He didn’t waste air screaming.  
  
He just couldn’t go out like this.  
  
Trapped under a destroyed helicopter, struggling as he broke and snapped his mangled body. He wanted to beg whoever would listen that he wanted to walk again, to move around again.  
  
He felt the heat reach his skin, a searing and numbing feeling. Soon he’d be dead, cooked to a crisp. He felt the rising pit of dread and tears. Panic. Panic enveloped him.  
  
_I CAN’T DIE LIKE THIS PLEASE GOD NO I-_ _  
_ _  
_ Heat increased, heat burned into his chest. The seals of his armor had given way, ceramic had probably melted.  
  
It had begun. He was going to die slow, and he was going to die painfully.  
  
_.it doesn't have to be like this._ _  
_ _  
_ The words had formed in the back of his mind, a weird oppressive feeling too. No voice to associate it with.  
  
_.the jungle calls to you, doesn’t it?_ _  
_ _  
_ The fuck? Had he cracked? Made sense, he was running out of air and had to be close to death anyway.  
  
_.you can’t hear it’s cry now.but it calls.it calls to every predator._ _  
_  
WHAT THE FUCK?  
  
.do you want to hunt?  
  
He closed his eyes. No more air. So the suffocation would get him first, not the fire.  
  
_.i can give you really want.but everything has a price.make your choice fast._ _  
_  
With a last wheeze of his gasmask, Nathan said yes. And then nothingness took him.  
  
….  
  
He hadn’t expected to wake up again. But he did.  
  
So there was an afterlife and he wasn’t in hell. Huh, well, that didn’t make much sense. After all he had ever done, he was sure it was going to be hell for him at the very least.  
  
When he came to he could see the blurry outline of a woman’s face poking at something to his left.. Just some trainee Doctor or a nurse, he assumed. Probably taking care of what was left of his burnt, charred ass.  
  
Then he realised that he could feel his limbs.  
  
_Yeah, I’m dead._  
  
He licked his lips and made no attempt to get up. Well, looked like his soreness had followed him over to the afterlife.  
  
“Y’know, I always thought Hell would be burning hot. Turns out it's pretty nice after all.”

 

His voice was still there, perhaps a little husky from passing into the ethereal realm. The Demoness who had dressed like a Doctor grew startled. It was probably feigned. An impish joke. No pun intended.  
  
“There’s no reason to pretend. I know I’m in Hell, just - let me know when the torture starts, and just let it not be fire.”  
  
Then the fucking demoness laughed. She shook her head and reached for a glass of water.  
  
“You know, I wish I was so virtuous in life that the Hell I got sent to was the Maldives”, she said.  
  
The Maldives? So his hell was a prison of a tropical paradise? Yeah, that sounds about right. He’d go stark raving mad in a week.  
  
She moved in close, and through his blurry vision he noticed her face. Light hair, blue eyes and she really didn’t look like a Succubus. For one, she had glasses, and even though she looked to be only a year or two older than he was. She looked pretty, but again he was stuck in the Irrawaddy for months at this point.  
  
She touched his forehead. Warm fingers. A draft of wind blew the thin and light curtains into view. Quite unlike what he expected Hell to be.  
  
“Y-If you keep on acting like you are I will have to write in a severe concussion.”  
  
He shrugged and laughed. As if dismissive of being alive, and that annoyed her.  
  
“Hey, I haven’t met another person so unhappy to be alive. All I know is that the spook types brought you in and your chopper went down somewhere in the Red Zone. Apparently you are really lucky and no one else made it.”  
  
_The fuck?_ _  
_ _  
_ Nathan let out a single laugh of disbelief. Just fucking how?  
  
“You know who paid for the prosthetics?”  
  
She looked incredulous as she asked: “What prosthetics?”  
  
_What the fuck?_  
  
“What the fuck are you on about? I was awake you know, trapped under the burning helicopter, my right leg was broken in so many places I felt the bone poke through the pants, and I kept thrashing around to get loose till I broke every bone in my arms-I...” Nathan broke off, nothing made sense.  
  
The doctor frowned and drew a small flashlight from her chest pocket. Holding it above his head she went through the same routine every other doctor before this had done when he’d come back with a head injury.  
  
Yeah, some concussion that was. He called bullshit on his luck and his brain because he thought he’d lost both legs and an arm trapped under there. So maybe it _was_ brain damage this time.  
  
There was that feeling again, a familiar feeling of having words form at the back of his mind. It was as if someone had put wriggling bugs in his mouth..  
  
_.live hunter, for your hunt comes soon._

  
He didn’t have to guess who died while he lived.

.…  
  
Nathan didn’t truly enjoy the three months in the Maldives. Sure, he drank and tanned and went swimming like every other tourist in the world, he even got laid more than a few times, but it was all going with the flow.  
  
Inside, a storm raged. Here he felt like he was stuck in an iron maiden. He laughed and smiled and told weird jokes but deep inside he was already back in the jungle, trapped under a burning helicopter trading his life for a Private from Texas.  
  
He got a paid vacation, he got a raise he didn’t know what to do with and the Department of Defence added a few more redactions to his file. The USMC Captain who pulled him out of Communist hands in the middle of the Irrawaddy Delta became a hero of sorts, even went to TV - didn’t and probably couldn’t talk about his existence of course - to describe a fallen helicopter and bodies burnt past recognition. The average American citizen saw it, got angry at the Communists for a while, then enjoyed Halloween and Thanksgiving. Their lives weren’t affected. Unless they were in Denver or New York, in which case they had other problems anyway. Like martial law and gas masks.  
  
Television networks kept counting the money as ratings kept soaring to new all time highs. Senators used this to milk the everloving fuck out of people and everyone in the Senate collectively agreed that the Burmese, the Chinese needed to be punished and that they would push the president to take harsh measures, to shut down all trade and communications and to protect the American way of life. He scoffed at that, because a speeches and war are different things, and both had layer upon layer of bullshit red tape.    
  
Some people in some parts of the country marched out on the streets, screamed for justice for the Red Zone, called for an end to the blockades, called for an end to war. In short, they wanted changes they barely understood and did not think through. If he had to blame anything, he’d blame how bad things had gotten since the 50s. But he did know for a fact that life was worse behind the Red Curtain.  
  
If the Red Zone came down, what would follow would be way worse. The Chinese already operated a spy network most people knew nothing about and that the Department of Defence spent almost all of its domestic manpower combing through every nook and corner in the country searching for. If the blockade came down, there would be a violent coup. Something most Americans wouldn’t enjoy.

 

China didn’t like any of it, because in spite of its cultural posturing and “praise communism”, the oil that ran its factories was very much American in origin. Capitalism was funny like that.  
  
And America didn’t stop Chinese access to the their oil, perhaps because Poseidon wanted to make even more money, or perhaps because the United States of America looked to its history and didn’t want a repeat. Either way, every American ally in the region took this opportunity to kick the Red Giant in the balls. Japan sent some strictly worded letters demanding Chinese Subs get the fuck out of Japanese waters, Korea wasn’t amused by China stoking the flames of separatism and India refused to mediate at all, citing “Non-Alignment.” It did however send assurances to both Korea and Japan of a nuclear response if China attacked.  
  
Russia rumbled like the old, dead bear it was, then went back to sleep in front of the world. In reality, it sent crates of Kalashnikov rifles and Vodka like it always did. They were ‘diplomatic aid’, meant for covert US operations in the Red Zone and Indian Ocean conflict area, sent to the contact in the US Embassy in Moscow, and from there to Herman Shipping co. in LA. A guy called ‘Norman’ had a bottle sent to him. It was good Vodka.  
  
One day, Major Smith, the DOD guy who was his field handler, sent him a holotape with a bottle of Whiskey, and a note that read: “You are going to need this”.  
  
And need it he did. It was a recording of television propaganda shown on Burmese and Chinese television, as well as a translation of intercepted national radio transmissions from the listening post in Boston. Commies claimed that the Americans shot down a Chinese chopper, then a couple of badly edited blurry images of the crash site, then forty five minutes of harrowing radio interviews of a bunch of old geezers who didn’t sound very convincing between the sixth glass of strong whiskey and the language barrier, who they claimed were parents who lost their children to the “Imperialist strongarm.” Then a daily list of martyrs who never existed.  
  
Because that was of course what had happened. The rocket that had shot the chopper down was American in origin, and of course there weren’t sevensixtwo holes in the Ceramic plating and of course the flattened bullets weren’t Chinese greentips, and how could he forget that of-fucking-course the corpses charred and mangled beyond recognition weren’t living breathing American boys with someone in the world to give a fuck about.  
  
Nobody gave a fuck about him, he didn’t have any friends other than Smith and the USMC guys who died in Burma. And Smith was a DOD Spook, he was nobody’s friend. He’d shoot his own mother in the back if his country demanded it.  
  
He wrote a long, long letter to the Private’s mother. Didn’t mention the Department, didn’t say why he was there, just gave her access to a bank account he had stashed a considerable sum of money to.  
  
It helped his mood, he got back into the swing of things, felt better. One week later there was even a reply, felt a little fishy between the way the ‘c’ and ‘s’ curved and the absence of grief or relief in the words, but he chose to believe that he had done at least one good deed in his life.

  
Things went slowly back to normal, and he started putting his time into losing the shore leave weight and improving his terrible handwriting, but Nathan couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was watching him.  
  
….  
  
Five months later he was back in the jungle. Not Burma, but China proper. Well, it used to be China till China herself shifted the borders back. That left the Yunnan buffer zone. He’d followed the Mekong river from Thailand in. His contact was a firebase full of Marines who hadn’t set foot in America for over two years. Didn’t talk much, didn’t joke around. Nothing like the bunch in Burma. The LTs were bad, the Captain worse but the Colonel took the cake. He didn’t even come to greet him, just sent a Captain to give him a tour of the base. That didn't make a good first impression.  
  
When his boat touched down the Captain didn't even help unload the luggage, just stood there. When he had managed to unload all of the gear, paid the Thai boat driver a little extra Nathan decided he'd have to make the first step. He reached into his pocket to offer the man a cigarette, but the look he received was almost wilting. Without a word he turned his head towards the firebase, signalling Nathan to lead the way.  
  
And on the way Captain Crusty kept eye-fucking him like he was a ticking time bomb. Or an unwelcome guest.  
  
But why would he be unwelcome? Firebases like theirs were forgotten half mothballed forts with forgotten crews in a war of stalemates. If any attention was ever thrown their way, it meant more resources, and that meant better food and repairs and better equipment. If anything, he’d be welcome. But then why was everyone acting so fucking strange?  
  
He casually greeted a soldier, a simple “Hey man, how ya doing?”  
  
The Marine gripped his 91 tighter, and stared at him in a rather accusatory manner. Like he had disturbed something hallowed, broken some unspoken rule. Then without a reply, the marine whipped his head forward, rather mechanically perhaps, and walked away without another glance.

Mrs. Dale at the orphanage used to tell him he had an ugly face, so maybe it was that. Or maybe it was because something was wrong with the air.  
  
Either way, he personally didn’t give a fuck as long as the men knew which end of the gun to point at Commies.  
  
On the long boat ride Nathan had read the long 41 page briefing he had been given. This place certainly was a little odd, but not odd enough for how the men behaved.  
  
Around seventy years ago southern Yunnan used to be farmland. Then something happened to the soil, most villages broke up, and they all went east. Then China militarized the entire region, and began cooking something up. Then the forest took over. Then even Chinese Science teams fucked off. The only things that still lived here was a village 12 miles upriver and shadows in the jungle.  
  
China had abandoned the jungle when shit started hitting the fan. Rather, they had shifted the border a towards the northeast, which was very unlikely for China, those fuckers still fought Russia for Zhenbao. But however unlikely that was, it was of concern to Political theorists and not to him. He was, in the minds of most other field agents, an overpaid, overequipped and overtrained analyst, who was known to make people disappear from time to time.  
  
He was here to do some analysis this time. The DOD had come up with something they called “Task plan 15B”, a failsafe of sorts. A covert strike on Beijing and an overturn of government in the heart of Red China. His part in the plan was to find a way into the buffer zone, and then past the border. If he had been here around forty or fifty years ago he’d probably need to eliminate a bunch of Reds, steal their data, send it back for decryption and translation, then use that to sneak past the Reds into China. There’d be garrisons, armed guards, a couple of bullets here and there… but right now? Now all that was left was the Yunnan Rainforest and a couple of poor bastards from the village upstream who probably didn’t even know that the commies had abandoned them.  
  
A thought crossed his mind. Earlier, on the ride in, he thought he saw a shadow. Nearly impossible to make out in the oppressive dark, and so he didn’t pay it much heed. He didn’t know if it was true or if his brain was playing tricks on him, but some part of his head told him he’d probably find something that waited for him there. Even though that strange feeling persisted, he felt more at ease here than he had felt in the Maldives.  
  
The LT didn’t want him near his barracks, something about the Alcohol he was carrying and the Marine Corps regulations about boozing on duty. Nathan didn’t manage to catch the rest of it because the LT spoke in a halting, almost mechanical way, but also slurred and stopped at odd places. He was completely fine about the relative isolation since he did need a dedicated workplace for the recon he was going to be doing, and on top of that, everyone in the Barracks was probably equally as weird as the soldier and the LT. He got an unused but somewhat recently renovated Office building, probably courtesy of the DOD. The Colonel considered for a few minutes then shrugged his assent.  
  
He was an older, heavyset man, with a slightly hobbling gait and with bags under his eyes.  
  
“Haven’t slept well, sir?”  
  
This was perhaps bordering on overfamiliarity but he wasn’t really in the Marine Corps. What was the Colonel going to do? Write a sternly worded letter to Director Brown?  
  
The Colonel suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, as if the machinery inside his head rumbled to find an answer to the question asked, and then in a strange and halting manner the reply was that he indeed wasn’t sleeping very well.  
  
As far as Nathan knew, senior officers in the Corps were allotted ‘sleeping aid’ under the regulations, ever since ‘63, then why did the Colonel not sleep well?  
  
Eh. Not his circus and not his horses, it didn’t ultimately matter. He had a job to do, and once that was done it was off to the next deployment.  
  
After around half a day spent in clearing out the room and throwing out the stacks after stacks of documents and brooming out the rat shit he felt that he could call this place his own for a while.  
  
It was small and relatively clean, had a cot in the back and enough space for two of his terminals and one vidscreen he’d brought. He stashed his carton of cigarettes under the cot, next to his stash of ‘nocturnal activity’ vids. The black polymer Kalashnikov he’d brought he set up on a table next to the reflex sight and a few bottles of whiskey and machine oil, and next to that he piled seven fully loaded polymer magazines. Those two hundred and ten 7.62x39 rounds was all he had for it until the Department sent in the next shipment.  
  
Then he went out for an unremarkable meal in remarkable company - which was a glorified way of saying he ate alone and in complete silence - and came back to sit with aerial photos and toposheets and charts to figure out how best to move in.  
  
The file title was a gibberish mess of letters and numbers, just like the analysis eggheads had demanded, and inside he wrote down the coordinates of his first choice of approach. The protection to be applied to the terminal was rather remarkable-four sets of encryption on top of the regular password protection.  
  
After that he set the alarm to 4:30 AM and went to bed.

In his dreams, he saw a naked, dirt caked child, sitting on a flat rock in the middle of a clearing in the jungle. He had a stone spear he was sharpening with another sharp stone.  
  
The jungle around Nathan looked to be just like every other rainforest in the world, but he raised his rifle to his shoulder and crept on as silently as he could. But no matter how hard he tried and how well he tried to sneak along he seemed to step on invisible twigs.  
  
And they snapped hard, unlike the wet undergrowth of a tropical rainforest. But the child seemed to absorbed in sharpening his spear to notice him, so he kept on moving as slowly and as carefully as he could till he reached the flat rock rock itself.  
  
He touched the child's shoulder, hoping that the child would turn around. Instead the child’s head turned, turned and turned, the skin wrapped itself in coils and the child’s head faced his back and smiled at him.  
  
The child still smiling, opened his mouth and spoke. But Nathan didn’t hear a voice, like before, words formed at the back of his mind.  
  
. _welcome home hunter._  
  
….  
  
Nathan woke an hour before his alarm rang. The nightmare had definitely messed him up a bit.  
  
It was dark and overcast outside, and the river gently rocked the motorboat which he was supposed to use to go upriver. Through the window, he noticed more than the usual amount of marines armed with 91s and coffee mugs. For the current hour anyway.  
  
His charts were already prepared, so he started boiling water in a kettle while he fished around in his belongings for the coffee powder. Once that was done he made sandwiches and tried his best to rub the sleep off his eyes. Didn’t work, so he boarded the boat.  
  
It was still very dark outside. But that didn’t really matter, he had a heavy-duty flashlight and a flare gun with him. Also a Kalashnikov with soviet green-tips and if all else failed he could throw a thermos full of boiling hot coffee and a box full of sandwiches at whatever assailed him.  
  
Once a similar box had dropped on his foot, and long story short he needed to get three stitches and at least one screw in the big toe. He tried not to think of incidents like those  
  
Nathan took one last look at the rough path he was supposed to cut through. This was his first run, so he was there to take stock of the situation, nothing major today. He had, based on aerial photographs and analysis of the overgrowth, sketched out a path about five miles upstream from the base, and then east from there.  
  
For the first time in around sixty or seventy years the loud whirr of a motorboat engine disturbed the heavy silence that hung over the forest. Along a small inland channel long inundated with silt and mud,with the wispy winds of the shady forest threading webs of malice around him, Nathan pressed on.  
  
Two miles, three miles, four miles upstream and the air kept getting heavier, and the sky nearly disappeared. Bright eyes followed him from within the forest. Nathan wondered what predators lurked in these forests and whether one of them was a tiger. He had never seen a tiger outside a zoo but in a forest like this anything was possible.  
  
The path further up was blocked with fallen, overgrown tree roots and stones. Deciding that this was as good a path to begin as any, Nathan found a convenient crevice to rest his boat on and jumped off.  
  
A strange jungle stood before him. Having lived and worked in more than a few forests for around three years, Nathan always thought he could somehow understand them. There were welcoming forests, with lush greenery and a sort of serenity, the sort people would visit if it wasn’t for the mosquitos and the difficulty of traversal. Then there were the outwardly threatening ones, like Irrawady, the moment he set foot in that hole in the earth he had understood that the forest seemed to be wary. Wary perhaps of all human intruders that had disturbed her children. But this forest was different in some odd way. It had the usual rainforest fare, vast swathes of green, thick tree trunks, a mushy undergrowth and an overgrowth so thick not a single radiant beam of the imminent sunrise warmed his cheeks.  
  
But the jungle itself seemed resistant, it was perhaps like a beautiful painting in that Nathan wanted to stare into it for hours, but at the same time, it had an odd sense of danger attached to it, like a poisonous cobra slithering up his neck. This forest set off every warning bell in his head. But he had a job to do and he was paid by the assignment, not the hour.  
  
He took one step, two steps, three steps with all the might he could muster. The jungle seemed to resist him. He pressed, but to no avail. For what seemed like an eternity he stood there trying to just take a single step further, but it was as if his legs were made of lead or something held them in place, two hands perhaps, beneath the mushy undergrowth with a grip stronger than steel. Then something seemed to click within him. The pressure eased and Nathan fell into a trance. He didn't realise for how long he had walked until the Jungle whispered him welcome. Then a small voice in his mind said “RUN, YOU FOOL.”  
  
Nathan broke from the trance, turned back and ran. And something ran behind him. Something big, with large floppy feet but a gait exactly matched to his. He stopped suddenly, and the footsteps seemed to cease. Then as if to test something, Nathan took a single step forward, and heard the same floppy footsteps. He broke into a run and didn’t make the mistake of looking back, no matter how hard and how many times the barrel of his Kalashnikov hit his knee and how loudly the batteries inside the big flashlight on his hip rattled, he still heard the floppy footsteps. But they seemed to abandon him once he was close to the edge of the river. He pushed his boat into the water, climbed in, turned it around and started the engine.    
  
By the time he reached base it was midday but he wasn’t hungry.  
  
He dropped his rifle, somehow undid the straps on his armour and discarded the chest piece in the middle of the room. He took two more steps and practically tore off the armour plates on his thighs. Next he crouched and got rid of his shoes.

After a long sleep and a few cigarettes, Nathan calmed down and realised that the Jungle wasn’t resisting him, his mind was resisting the jungle.

...  
  
Nathan slept terribly for the next week and a half. Had he been in his right mind, he would also realise that every one of the soldiers on that base seemed worse off. Haggard, drained and weirder than usual. He would only realise that years later, in hindsight, once mistakes made had been set in stone. Hindsight, as they say, was a bitch.  
  
One particular dream kept bothering him. In it, he’d wake up in different locations in his life. The first time it was Ophelia Summers’ basement, where he had made out with her in ‘52, then a storeroom in his Middle School, then his dorm room in College and finally on the ninth day it was a smoky, feverish cabin in the Burmese Rainforest.  
  
He’d always see himself in a dishevelled half naked condition, and on the last day with a week old stubble, clutching a loaded shotgun while something invisible breathed down his neck. He’d fight the invisible foe the best he could. When his gun would run dry he’d reach for his knife, turn back and run and run till the invisible assailant would catch up to him. And then he’d see himself be dried up. And in his dream, he’d feel unimaginable, excruciating pain.  
  
Every time, he’d wake up in a cold sweat, get out of bed as quick as he could and listen to the radio for the rest of the night. But then one night, and it was the night after the Irrawaddy cabin, when he woke up, he felt the pain. Not perhaps as much as in the dream or when he trapped under the helicopter, but the pain was so severe he couldn’t move a muscle for over an hour.  
  
As he lay on his bed, veins in his head popping up as he strained to scream, he felt something invisible slowly sucking the life out of him.  
  
Then he woke up.  
  
This place was getting to him.  
  
He was in the jungle.  
  
There are certain things in existence man is not supposed to know. Man is supposed to build on with incomplete theorems, unfinished songs. Of glory only half complete, for sanity cannot compete with complete reality.  
  
Nathan took another step. Where was he? The jungles of Burma? In China? Or was he in the primordial muck where he wasn’t supposed to go, hunting for something he was never supposed to find? He didn’t know the answer. No one ever did.  
  
Something large and wet loomed over his shoulder. Another wet splotchy step as he took one of his own.  
  
How long had he been here? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? It never mattered. It was as if his youthful body had been drained of essence, he had almost been reduced to the living dead. But he wasn’t dead. Not yet. He could still carry the weight of a rifle. He could still shoot.  
  
He laboured on, red eyes and slackened skin. His white teeth were dull and grey with age and with countless cigarettes smoked. He didn’t know the date, he didn’t even know his own name anymore. He didn’t even know why he was down here in the first place.  
  
Politics, notions, Capitalism, Communism no longer mattered to him. All that existed was this gun he was holding and the bullets in it. He knew that the further he walked from the boat the harder it would be to get back. Even if he faced off against whatever had been tormenting him for years would his old bones even make it back?  
  
Old bones? Yes, he was old now. And to think that there was a time this never seemed a possibility to him.  
  
He considered the implications of turning back. That would mean certain death. But would that be so bad? He didn’t know anymore. He had no reason to continue on like this, every bit of his rationality had him prefer the prospect of staring certain death in the eyes to another second in this putrid hole.  
  
He was atomized when he turned, the white hot pain searing through every fibre of his being.  
  
Nathan woke up again.  
  
He was Nathan. Nathan William Irons. He was the greatest warrior known to man, and his country’s only way into the heart of the Red Scourge. All he had was his rifle and the bullets in it, and every bit of his youth, his wits and his skills.  
  
He was the last line of defence of the free world, of Democracy the world over. And the wet sploshing steps behind him? They were nothing, just another obstacle he would crush under his heel. But not now, he had to bide his time.  
  
Nathan strode on unafraid of the dark, of the creatures and spirits that made this forest their home.  
  
For a long long time he kept walking and the wet footsteps kept following until finally they faltered, seemingly confused that a human was able to keep his nerves up for so long. And then Nathan had his moment.  
  
He turned, and the Kalashnikov roared to life. His eyes were squeezed shut. He didn’t know why, but his gut told him that squeezing his eyes shut would be ultimately best for him.  
  
He sprayed the thirty rounds in the magazine in the beast’s general direction, and immediately he was flung back with force much more powerful than he had thought his body would be capable of handling.  
  
He tasted blood in his mouth yet remembered to keep his eyes squeezed painfully shut. He felt his way around to the pouch and drew another magazine for the rifle. Deft fingers went through the motions it had gone through time and time again and he rolled.  
  
His gut told him that the beast was infront of him, and he hefted the gun in its general direction and squeezed the trigger as hard as he could. Thirty greentips barreled their way through that which should not exist, and human ingenuity defeated the undefeatable.  
  
Nathan felt as if he should have heard a roar, but there was no roar to be heard, just an oppressive silence shaped like a deafening roar. One thing was for sure, he had won.  
  
Nathan lifted his head to what he was sure was the sky, basking in his victory.  
  
Nathan woke up again.  
  
He was neither the feverish man using every ounce of himself to fight an uphill battle, nor the weak old man who had lost his name, lost his purpose. But he still wasn’t Nathan the American hero. He was still a regular man, who hurt and bled and lied and drank and ate.  
  
But there he was, in the unwelcome, strange place that was getting to him. In a forest, surrounded by that which should not exist or things man should not be privy to. He still had a rifle, it was still loaded with greentips. The wet splotchy footsteps were still behind him.  
  
_.you have had a vision of what you could be.yet the final choice is still yours._ _  
_ _  
_ Had he now? He couldn’t seem to recall what was real and what was a fever dream. Maybe all of this was unreal, maybe he was still dying under a burning crashed helicopter.  
  
_.is that your final answer hunter.how disappointing._ _  
_ _  
_ The voice in his head didn’t sound disappointed, it sounded annoyed. Wait, did he gauge inflection from words forming without a voice like thoughts that weren't his? Either he was getting used to this or he was getting more crazy than he thought. But the voice was right, this wasn’t his final answer. It couldn’t be. How pathetic of him to even consider it.  
  
Nathan stopped, as did the footsteps. The time to strike was here, and he made his choice.  
  
The legend of Nathan Irons was born.

**Author's Note:**

> This thing wouldn't be possible without the help of my friend [TurboToast](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/TurboToast). Do check him out, he writes some amazing Overwatch fics. And if you made it so far thank you!


End file.
